MAGGIE PAGANO: As City's top fund managers join the fight... It's time to smash the glass ceiling

One of the UK's first females to chair a FTSE 100 company once told me there will only be equality of women in business when there are as many mediocre women at the top as there are men.

That was many years ago, when her appointment was considered so rare that it made front-page news, and when women made up only a handful of either executive or non-executive directors.

Since then there has been a big leap in the number of women at board level.

In a stunning move yesterday, some of the City's biggest fund managers said they will vote against board appointments in companies that do not have enough female executives

This was partly due to the work of the Coalition government's Lord Davies report, which told the bosses of listed companies that if they didn't recruit more women as non-executive directors, they would be forced to take them through mandatory quotas.

Share this article

As you might expect, the stick did the trick. Within a couple of years, the number of female non-executive directors nearly doubled to around 24 per cent.

Yet despite the best efforts of government and much wishful thinking, it's no surprise this proportion has hardly budged because the stick went away.

But now there is a cudgel instead of a stick, and this time it's being wielded by the owners of the UK's listed companies – the fund managers themselves.

In a stunning move yesterday, some of the City's biggest fund managers said they will vote against board appointments in companies that do not have enough female executives.

This is a game-changer and could be just what is needed to get women moving on up again. It's important, too, that the funds making this promise are big beasts such as Jupiter Asset Management, Old Mutual Global Investors, Newton Investment Management and the Environment Agency Pension Fund, to name a few.

These are investors which own billions of shares in the UK's biggest companies – and hopefully, what they do or say will influence other asset managers.

At the same time the 30% Club, which lobbies to increase the number of women in business, is stepping up its campaign for other fund managers to follow suit.

As the club's new boss Brenda Trenowden points out, funds can show their muscle in two ways – by voting against disclosure expectations and voting against directors' elections.

What's more, she's being backed by other big City names: head of the Financial Reporting Council Sir Win Bischoff, London Stock Exchange boss Xavier Rolet and Aviva chief Euan Munro, who are supporting the club's ambition as they know having a more diverse board is good business.

So do 72 of the UK's biggest companies that signed up to the Government's recently launched charter on gender diversity – many in finance – with 60 of them promising to have women in at least 30 per cent of all senior roles by 2021.

Many of them, such as Virgin Money and Legal and General, say they are aiming for parity in senior roles.

These are great ambitions and should be lauded. Yet they are not easy to put into action or to monitor.

For example, how many is enough women? Should there be a third or a half in senior positions? Or, more bluntly, who judges when there are as many mediocre women as men in power?

Now for HS3

If the government can build HS2 then ministers should also get going with HS3. Arguably, the HS3 east to west line is far more important to improving the country's transport infrastructure and turning the Northern Powerhouse into reality.

Anyone travelling regularly will know how truly awful the journeys are crossing the country.

There are few direct intercity lines and the trains are old stock, slow and overcrowded – as I know having travelled from Cambridge to Birmingham for the Tory party conference last week.

The 98-mile journey took three and a half hours. Traversing the country further north takes four hours for the 176 miles between Liverpool and Newcastle.

These crazy journey times are one of the big reasons why economic growth and GDP in the North lag so far behind the South.

HS3 will cost a fraction of HS2, but would contribute far more proportionately to growth.

And funding? Well, let the regions take charge. Local mayors should be given powers to raise local taxes, attract private money and maybe even raise local bonds. That's what the Victorians would have done.

Brand explosion

First to blow up was Samsung with its Galaxy smartphone battery catching fire and now Sweden's Ericsson looks like it is going up in smoke too.

Both companies shocked the market with dire profit warnings yesterday, which sent the shares crashing.

While both are in the mobile market, their problems are quite different and Samsung's are easier to contain.

It's taking a hit of £14.6billion on the recall of its handsets, but has dealt with the problems swiftly is likely to recover.

But Ericsson is in deep crisis, having sacked its chief executive in the summer. It's the world's biggest mobile network equipment operator, but is losing out to Nokia and Huawei.